The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.

As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.

Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.

If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.